Printed Library Overview

bjoernb78

Hi there,

meanwhile I have countless assets and it's hard to keep an overview of what I have. For my inspiration I'd love to have a printed asset list with images. In best case sorted by category and without prices.

So my question is, if there is an easy/fast way to generate automatically a printable index of the assets I have? How would you do that?

Thanks!

DannisWrites

I don't know how you would get images in this, but I do a vanilla text directory list to keep track of the stories I write and version directories.

The basic thing you want first is, figure out which directory paths have your stuff. Make a note of them in a text file.

Create a Notepad file, not a word-processor file.

Basically, you can do something like this:

echo off
 title Story Directory Batch File
 :: This line is a comment
 echo Title of this .bat file is Story Directory Batch File
echo on
cd d:\LibreOffice\Stories\
 REM The FOR loop can be used to iterate over files
FOR %%f IN (*) DO echo %%f >> 0Story.txt
pause

cd d:\LibreOffice\Archive
 REM The FOR loop can be used to iterate over files. Changed f to d for directories, did not work.
dir d:\LibreOffice\Archive\ /s /b /og >> 0Archive.txt

-----------------------

This little batch file is what I use to get a list of my files in a directory. It's run in every version of Windows  I ever had, and I modified it for Win 10. If you look up 'batch file writing' on Google you can get explanations of what the commands mean.

Basically the rem command is for notes to yourself in your batch file. Anything after rem is ignored.

Echo means 'print this on the screen' so echo off at the start means the rem won't be printed on the screen when you run the .bat file, but echo on does. I set it to echo so I can see it work. Pause makes it stop every screenfull and you hit the spacebar to set it going again.

FOR %%f IN (*) DO echo %%f >> 0Story.txt

This line does the magic. Make sure your file batch.bat or whatever you name it is copied into the directory you want to copy. Name your output file assets.txt or whatever makes sense to you. The batch file must end in .bat to work. The output file has to be .txt for a simple text file. I called mine 0Story.txt so it would appear at the top of my directory, but you can call it anything. There is one space and one space only between the >> and the filename.

The second part makes a directory listing of my Archive directory, which is a set of directories under Story.  It prints each directory and the files in it. The 0Archive.txt file is a lot bigger than the 0Story.txt file because I have a directory for each story title and all the versions of those stories over the years. I have over 600 stories, so this listing is not hundreds of thousands of filenames like our asset directories would be. However, for the thousands of files that do print into the file, it only takes a few seconds. BTW, these directories have renders I've done of locations, character renders, research notes, plot outlines, etc etc. So, yes, it's in the thousands of files just for 600 stories :)

Once you have your list, you can import the columns into a spreadsheet and manually copy your picture files beside them, but for thousands of files, that's tedious work. There is probably a way to do a batch file to add the thumbnails, or maybe you can write a macro in the spreadsheet or word processor to accomplish this. A word processor document might not be able to handle the filesize, though.

I wish someone could write a software to do this! I would buy it to get a catalog of my assets, especially if it could mine the ReadMe's for permissions, finite phrases like 'rendered images ok' or any 'do not's' for those of us who have to worry about copyrights for commercial use. Maybe it could even copy the text from the read me's into a database.

I used to have databases in Access to track all of these things and my story covers, but Microsoft kept changing until it outgrew my meager skills and my databases got too complex for me to handle the programming. So I'm back to little text files for the most part :(

Hope this little macro is helpful as a stopgap measure. Happy Holidays!